Kent → Italy
Italy is the only European destination we run where the vehicle's route is a genuine engineering choice rather than a preference — mountains with restrictions on one side, a longer coastal road on the other.
Down through France past Dijon and Lyon, then Mont Blanc into the Aosta valley or Fréjus into Turin. Shortest for Turin, Milan, Como, Maggiore and Garda.
Down the French Mediterranean coast past Aix and Nice, crossing at Ventimiglia onto the Italian Riviera, then the A10 to Genoa and the A1 south for Tuscany, Rome and beyond.
Almost every Italian city of any age has a zona a traffico limitato over its historic centre — camera-enforced, automatically fined, and entirely indifferent to the fact that you are moving house.
If the delivery address sits inside one, the options are a permit applied for in advance through the comune or a transfer to a permitted smaller vehicle. Both are ordinary; neither can be arranged at eight in the morning with a lorry already blocking a street. So we check the exact address against the zone before anything is loaded in Kent.
Apply through the consulate before you go. Without it there is no residency registration, no utility account and no clean customs entry. After that: proof of the Italian address, the iscrizione anagrafica at the comune, and the inventory itemised and valued in Italian.
Italy checks documentation more closely than France or Spain. That is not a problem so much as a reason to start earlier than feels necessary.
Italian-bound loads out of Kent carry more stone, marble, cast iron and framed art than most. All of it moves perfectly well crated or braced, and none of it moves well as an afterthought. Flag those pieces at survey so the crew size and the materials are right.
A large share of these moves attach to a property still being worked on. Delivering into a building site is how good furniture gets ruined, and the honest answer is usually to hold the load in store here until the house is genuinely finished.
France covers the first part of both routes in more detail.
Worth knowing
The destination and the season. Mont Blanc or Fréjus are shortest for Turin, Milan and the lakes but are toll tunnels with vehicle restrictions and can close in weather. For Tuscany, Rome and anything further south the coastal run through Ventimiglia is longer on the map and more predictable in practice.
They restrict vehicles by height, length and load type, and the rules are not negotiable at the barrier. It is one of the reasons the route is decided at planning stage rather than by a driver on the day.
The camera-enforced restricted zone over the historic centre of most Italian cities. Unauthorised vehicles are fined automatically. Delivering inside one needs either a permit arranged in advance through the comune or a transfer to a permitted smaller vehicle.
The codice fiscale, applied for through the consulate before you go. Everything else in the Italian process depends on it: the address proof, the iscrizione anagrafica at the comune, and the inventory in Italian.
Then wait. Furniture delivered into an active site gets dusty at best and ruined at worst, and Italian restorations overrun exactly as British ones do. Hold the load in store here until there are finished floors and a door that locks.
Stone, marble, cast iron and large mirrors all travel regularly, crated or braced rather than blanket-wrapped. Tell us at survey — a marble table top is not a two-person lift and the crew size changes accordingly.
Access tends to be the shore road rather than the property: narrow, occasionally one-way, sometimes with a walk from the nearest parking. Photographs of the final approach are worth more than any description.
The address decides the route and whether there is a restricted zone. The list decides the crew and the crating.